The Secret Origin of the Wailing Stone!
by CondorRadcliff
Summary: Where did the Wailing Stone come from? What kind of missions do the Crystal Gems go on without Steven? And what happens when the author can't use dialogue to answer these questions? (A story written for the 4/15/18 All Narrative Challenge in the Writer's Anonymous forum - "WA All/No Dialogue Challenge". Rated T for the last joke.)
1. Chapter 1

The Secret Origin of the Wailing Stone!

 _A No-dialogue Narrative_

It was a low hum at first, one of those famously mysterious hums that seemed to haunt cities here and there. Soon, though, it was a low ringing. As time passed this ringing increased, reverberating through the buildings, between them, chasing out all the little creatures that called the city home. With each passing day the ringing became more and more noticeable to even the humans, until they could no longer tolerate it and found reasons to leave for a 'long weekend' outside the suburbs. By the time the York Mayor's Office asked the Crystal Gems for help, the ringing was registering as high as 90 dB in some areas.

So naturally, the local Warp Pad was in one of those areas, in a field next to a subway station. The Crystal Gems arrived in a beam of light one afternoon, and then immediately covered their ears.

"... … **. ? ...!** " Pearl said, her voice and inflection rising as she tried to make herself understood over the ringing. " **!...!** " she continued.

"?!" Amethyst replied, unable to understand any of what Pearl had just said.

This punctuation/exclamation conversation continued for some time between them, as they each tried to argue their side of a one-sided argument. It ended only when Garnet stepped between and pushed them apart; with their attention on her, she materialized a set of protective earmuffs on her head. " _ **...**_ " she said, pointing.

Gems did not need ears to hear, considering them something of a decoration or a prop for body language, and so didn't always create them on their forms. When they wore earmuffs it was simply a visual cue to indicate that the wearer had turned off their hearing. Pearl was a Gem who, despite living on Earth for millenia, typically made only token efforts to appear human. She hadn't given her physical form ears, but nonetheless materialized her earmuffs on her head as though she did.

Amethyst, who actually had ears, wore her earmuffs on her shoulder. From the way she posed afterwards, it was for the sake of style - stylish asymmetry being her guiding light as far as appearances were concerned. Also: it _annoyed_ Pearl. She made sure to flash a full grin at her, to rub it in. (None of them could hear the annoyed grunt Pearl made in response, but it was understood to exist in the same way water did in an ocean.)

With earmuffs on, the Crystal Gems were in a world of silence. Gems who spent time in space got used to non-aural communication, but the Crystal Gems had grown used to Earth's bountiful sound transmission mediums. They'd never really had a need to create or practice nonverbal communication.

So that was why Garnet, through careful gesturing, communicated that they needed to find and challenge a cooked turkey to a game of tennis. Pearl responded by first producing a glitching hologram in her hand, only to turn it off in irritation. Then she asked with gestures if they therefore required a hovercraft to collect goulash-makers for a monthly mustache maintenance. This conversation continued in this vein until Amethyst, confused by all the _gesturing_ , shapeshifted into an icon of a ringing bell and an arrow pointing at it. The arrow kept her eyes, which she blinked for emphasis.

Garnet and Pearl looked at her for a second, then nodded.

Their plan agreed upon, the Crystal Gems entered the station and descended the hundred or so feet down to the tunnel itself.

* * *

Normally their missions involved a certain amount of guesswork. Artifacts and Gem Monsters had a habit of not making their mischief where they could be easily found, and sometimes it took _days_ just to figure out their operating territory. The York City Government had given them a place to start, but humans had a tendency to not fully understand how 'magical' things worked...

...So the Crystal Gems were surprised to find that they'd gotten it right! The ringing was louder underground - they could _taste_ how loud it was. From the subway station platform they could see milk-white crystalline tendrils snaking along the subway tunnel like penicillin through blue cheese. They didn't look structural or decorative, didn't seem human in origin, and worse, did not appear to have any beginning or end. Little mushrooms sprouted from the tendrils at intervals of several inches or so, mineral in composition and clearly vibrating with the ringing.

More importantly, the mushrooms were all glowing varying tones of purple. Pearl and Garnet looked expectantly at Amethyst, who _vigorously_ denied any involvement.

Garnet walked over and tore a piece out of a tendril. It fell apart into dust in her gauntlet, and the tendril didn't immediately grow back nor showed any sign of doing so. That was the easy part; the hard part was that the tendrils were still on the wall, and their mushrooms still glowing, despite the 'circuit' having been broken.

So, Garnet tore another piece out, creating an isolated length of tendril on the wall and another handf- _gauntletful_ of dust. The mushrooms continued to glow and vibrate in the isolated section. This complicated things. Finding the immediate cause of the problem was _usually_ the harder half of a mission. By themselves the mushrooms and the tendrils were probably harmless, and were a threat only because some Gem-related power source or mother unit or something was supplying power to them. Worse, it was the act of _removing_ the tendrils that deactivated them, not simply cutting them off.

The Crystal Gems looked back at a subway map on an oddly pristine support pillar. It was a far smaller system than Empire City's or even Windy City's, thankfully, but still a substantial metro of seventy miles over five lines with a handful of interchanges. They would need to go down each line to search for the power source.

So began Part Two of their mission. It was going to be a long day.

They all slumped a little, dispirited. Steven had caught them on their way out of the Temple earlier, excited about some mini-golf coupons he'd amassed through a method involving creamed corn(?), most likely to be followed later by _digestion_. They'd had to turn him down then, but had been hoping to finish quickly so they could all go golfing.

Their sighs and grumbling were lost to the deafening silence.

Under the circumstances it would be best if they each drove in three cars to the party, Pearl explained through gestures, and that would allow them to avoid air traffic. A confused moment later, Garnet gestured that the Triple Force would grant them the Silvery Power necessary to individually defeat the Dark Lord Pluton on the Snake Path. The other two took a moment to digest these quest parameters, but decided that it was above their current party level.

Amethyst, this time thrown for a loop by the evolving mission parameters, started drawing a four-panel comic in the floor dust. Super-deformed representations of the Crystal Gems each walked along a different line, evidently looking for something (" **?** " " **?** " " **...** "). Then the adorable little anime-Amethyst suddenly found something (" **!** ") and ran back to a central point, upon which all three Crystal Gems (" **!** " " **!** " " **!** ") united and ran towards what she'd found.

Garnet and Pearl nodded in agreement. (They were also impressed by the cuteness of their caricatures, and would later on use them to explain things to Steven.) The sooner they got done, the better, so they picked lines to search and got to work. Pearl ran off towards the Downtown Loop line, Garnet went into the Edward-Yondan line, and Amethyst went back up to the surface to the Airport line.

* * *

It was after midnight on the station clock by the time the Crystal Gems met up again. They looked - well, Garnet might say they looked awesome after searching for hours and only creating more dust. Time was eating at them. None of them wanted to be there in the first place, and now they were buckled in for overtime. Amethyst was kicking at the floor dust in frustration, and Pearl was practicing putts with her spear.

Garnet pointed at them individually and, when they were looking at her, slapped her hands together. It was, to a Gem, as unmistakable as giving a thumbs up during a _show_ (pron. 'sh _OWww_ '), throwin' up the horns during a live concert… or flipping a pair of birds whilst confidently moonwalking out of a situation. Only a newly-created Gem could miss the meaning, and the Crystal Gems all counted their ages in millenia.

Amethyst and Pearl, whose personalities were about as similar as cheese and a grater, only fused in dire life-or-death all-or-nothing situations. This situation wasn't that, but it was perfectly _annoying_ and that was enough. Besides, now that they'd cleared out three lines and their chances of encountering the primary threat had improved, they needed **power** more than numbers. With a nod, they played their amalgamating music in the silence of their minds, danced to it, then danced into each other and…

In a flash of light, Opal stood before Garnet now, a full head taller than her and thus hunched over a little to avoid bumping into the ceiling. Perhaps representative of her component states of mind, she'd materialized with one pair of arms in a most-muscular pose, crossing the other pair with one hand thoughtfully cupping her chin.

Oddly, the earmuffs had carried over, so she wore one on her head and the other on her shoulder. She looked over at the shoulder one curiously and, dropping pretensions of poise, pulled one of the cups up.

Ringing _pain_ flashed across her face.

She let the earmuff cup snap back on and, after recovering in the silence, looked expectantly at Garnet with a sheepish smile.

Garnet nodded, her arms crossed, her expression blank. It hadn't been _necessary_ to confirm that the ringing was still reverberating throughout the whole subway system, even where the tendrils had been torn down. But, now they knew.

The actual plan was simple: there were only two lines left, and now there were two of them, so they would start at the center of the U-shaped Edward-University line, the longest of the five, then move to the Alan line when they finished.

They might even make it home before dawn.

* * *

At four in the morning, all the Edward-University and Alan lines had in them was more former-tendril dust. The ringing still hadn't stopped and the Crystal Gems were out of leads and patience. Garnet _appeared_ as stoic and aloof as ever, but her visor hid a slight _twitch_ in her left and middle eyes. And when her gauntleted hands rested on anything, it would otherwise have been possible to hear an impatient, stony tapping.

Opal was not doing much better. At some point in the past few hours she'd developed a new habit of producing her bow and dry-loosing it at some nonexistent target behind her, then dissipating it - and repeating. Her fingers twitched with uncharacteristic irritation even as her expression remained serene and focused.

They'd noticed each other's tics, of course. It did nothing to alleviate the situation to know that the other was just as _100% done_ with it all. But then Garnet noticed something out of the corner of her eye. When Opal rematerialized her bow again, Garnet suddenly grabbed the wrists holding it.

Confused, but realizing there was probably a plan there, Opal handed over her bow. Gem weapons would stay solid so long as they remained within a certain distance of their owner. Anyone other than Opal might be able to play it as a _Duxianqin_ , or perhaps its double-bass equivalent, but they would need to be both competent _and_ at least eight feet tall. Out of her hands, the ' **Super Archery** ' bow was a paperweight. (Incidentally, Amethyst was no longer allowed to name their weapons, not after her '90s anime phase.)

The bow, regardless of whether there was anything to to fire from it, was still a bow. And that meant it had a bowstring, which as Garnet held up to point out, was vibrating on its own from the ambient sound. She wiggled her finger to show a slight shift in amplitude as she swung it away from one end of the tunnel to the other.

It took a moment - Opal's focus was hard to shift from a mission - but she suddenly understood, and showed it with a Pearl-esque exaggerated expression.

Then Garnet carefully touched the bow to the side of the tunnel.

The bowstring began to _dance_.

That was it. They hadn't been able to find the source of the ringing in the tunnels, because it was originating from outside the tunnel, _in the earth_. And they had a way to track it now.

* * *

One testy four-hour game of 'cold _warm_ **hot** ' later, they had a pretty good idea of where the source might be. Just out of the Empire's Marl station, a quarter of the way towards the Alan-Edward junction on the Edward-University line, there was a nondescript door leading to a service corridor. The bowstring reacted the strongest to it, and so it was a likely candidate.

The door, really a hatch, hadn't been cleaned recently and so was as grimey as the tunnel floor. It was clearly marked and obvious, but also so out of the way that none of the Crystal Gems had considered them earlier. On closer inspection though, tendrils appeared to originate from it, slithering through the cracks around the hatch.

Garnet and Opal _tried_ not to gnash their teeth in exasperation when they saw this.

Naturally, the hatch was locked, so Garnet punc- _opened_ it with the quickness. (Deep inside her mind, there had been a short debate on whether that was necessary or not. A _cooler_ head prevailed: minor collateral damage was not a problem if it got them back home faster.) The hatch, now decorated with the impression of a large fist and missing its hinges, clattered down the corridor. At least, it _would_ have clattered down the corridor and very suddenly, very _loudly_ removed the element of surprise, if it had been quiet and the floor was concrete.

An ordinary service corridor would have been dimly lit and made of concrete. But there was no concrete _visible_ in the corridor. Only those tendrils, covering every inch of floor, walls, and ceiling in their unsettling infestation. There seemed to be even more of those the little mushrooms sprouting from them than usual, drenching the tendrils in so much of their purple light that it was hard to tell what color they actually were. And at the point where the corridor would normally seem to stretch forever into darkness, the corridor simply terminated in brilliant purple.

Garnet and Opal looked at each other and nodded, _grinning_. Without waiting to set up a plan, Opal crawled in first, shuffling along on her knees and tearing apart tendrils so quickly that her four arms looked like eight. Garnet followed, hunched over slightly, her three eyes darting around to find any place the tendrils might be growing from.

The corridor was perpendicular to the subway tunnel, and they made their way further and further west. Further and further, and further still, until there was no indication that they were still even in a subway. Soon they'd gone past the point where it made sense for the corridor to end - and sure enough, when Garnet loosened her focus a little, she saw they were in a earthen tunnel.

Meanwhile, Opal focused on tearing out tendrils with her usual single-mindedness. It didn't matter where she was, just that there were still tendrils ahead of her, all bathed in that accursed purple light. And then, suddenly, she found herself in an empty chamber, tall enough for her to stand up in and as wide as Steven's room. It contained nothing but the tendrils which formed the floor and walls and ceiling - in which there was a spot, dead in the center, from which everything grew.

But before she could investigate, the mushrooms dimmed and began to pulse with obvious force. As the ringing intensified Opal was forced down onto a knee, the pearl in her forehead rattling with pain. She tried to form her bow, but while Amethyst's ' **Blitz Heliotrope** ' whip materialized just fine, Pearl's ' **Bayonet Spiral** ' spear fizzled out.

With her eyes forced shut in agony, Opal didn't see the ' **Cardinal Azure** ' gauntlets _rocket_ past her and into the wall; she did, however, feel the force of the explosion they created. She also felt the azoic remains of some tendrils and mushrooms splatter against her, and a corresponding relief from the headache they were causing. She opened her eyes to see Garnet motioning for her to _move_ … while clearly gearing up to fire off a ' **Stronger Electro-Fall** '. (Amethyst was also no longer allowed to name attacks.)

As Opal scrambled into the safety of the tunnel, the chamber erupted into a silent thunderhead of electrocuted ash.

With the immediate threat reduced to nonexistence at the molecular level, it was Garnet's turn to fall onto her knees in exhaustion at the sudden release of energy. She pointed up at the hole in the ceiling, motioning in a strangely calm fashion that suggested she wanted Opal to stop lazing around on her large(r) backside and eliminate whatever was up there with _violence_.

Opal rolled back into the chamber, and for the first time that day stood _en pointe_.

* * *

It was already daylight in the southeastern corner of Great North/ _Grand Nord_. The City of York and its metropolitan area had mostly woken up - or, at least, anything that hadn't already evacuated did. Normally at this point, York's twenty or so golf courses would have some bad golfers playing bad golf _their_ way, but today the clubs were all temporarily closed.

One of those twenty was Pommier Golf Course, basically across the street from Empire's Marl Station. It was no exception to the widespread golf outage, so of course no one was around to see an ' **Opal Arrow** ' burst out of the fairway on the 11th, perhaps Par 2 distance from the hole. If someone had been there, they would have seen that bright arrow carry a brown bell-shaped object some distance into the sky, until the light became a bubble. They would have seen it fall more gently to the ground than gravity would normally allow, until it landed in one of the hole's sand traps with a gentle ' _pomp_ ', barely kicking up any dust at all, and only just making a small impression in the sand.

But, of course, no one _was_ around to see. This was advantageous, for insurance reasons.

* * *

Opal dug herself up through the ground, saving one arm to carry a drained Garnet with. For a Gem Fusion of her size and strength, digging up through a hundred feet or so of earth was the easiest part of the mission. She stood on her heels and smiled at the sun, glad to see it again.

Then she made the mistake of looking back. Whatever she'd shot through and dug out of, it was under a carefully manicured lawn. The inner conflict this caused was so great that she degenerated from a humanoid form to a mass of light, which then _popped_ into Amethyst and Pearl being thrown apart and into the ground.

Garnet simply dropped face-first into the grass. If it had been possible to see her face, her resignation to Opal's relative instability as a Fusion would have been obvious.

The three Crystal Gems stayed down for a moment, catching their breath, exhausted from energy drain and/or the effect their enemy had on them. They would all have preferred a knock-down-drag-out slugfest to the double-overtime slog this mission ended up being. But it was almost over now; really, all over except for any endgame.

As usual, Amethyst recovered first, getting to her feet and walking over to the sand trap - whip at the ready, just in case. By the time Pearl and Garnet had recovered enough to stand a few moments later, she was waving at them to come over. (Amethyst _had_ been no longer allowed to do safety checks, but she'd convinced the others she could be on probation instead.)

The arrow-bubble had dissipated already, leaving the bell-shaped object laying harmlessly on its side in a pit of sand. One look and it was clear, it was a _Wailing Stone_ of all things: a Rebellion device made from Earth materials, used for ranged transmissions. By itself, it would have been unable to do much of anything, and certainly couldn't have colonized the full York city subway on its own.

No, that was the doing of the corrupted Gem that had somehow gotten jammed into its output aperture. It was an Amethyst (a _different_ Amethyst), which explained the lighting. It appeared to be stunned, either from the electric shock or the arrow, and so it was safe for Garnet to approach it, remove from the Wailing Stone, and put it into a bubble of her own making.

And that was that. Their mission was over. The only loose end left was to contact York officials, and let them know things were safe again.

There was one question on the Crystal Gems' minds, though: where had they ended up? There was sand, and a trimmed lawn (that now apparently had car-sized gophers living in it), and an even more closely trimmed lawn a short distance away...

...with a little post sticking out of it, atop of which was a little flag marked with an **11**.

It was Garnet who figured it out first, howling with silent laughter at the ridiculously apropos coincidence, until Pearl and Amethyst caught on and joined in. Still laughing, Garnet picked up the Wailing Stone and they all headed back to the Warp Pad.

Just before they warped home, Pearl remembered that they were _still_ wearing their earmuffs. This set off a new round of laughter as they shucked them off, and they headed home in a beam of light - all of them excited about _finally_ going mini-golfing with Steven, in relative _quiet_! No more weird Gem situations for them that day!

* * *

A few days later the Pommier Golf Course management committee returned to a quiet city, only to find the mound in the 11th hole fairway. Concerned, they immediately licensed their groundskeeper to _politely_ terminate the enormous mutant gophers with extreme prejudice.


	2. Deleted Scene - Thoughts

_Author's note: this was part of the first draft of the story, while I was still banging out the meat and bones of it, intending to edit it down later to something that would fit the restrictions of the All Narrative contest. This following section describes the individual Gems' thoughts and as such would be disqualifying, so I cut it from the second edit onwards. I heard a couple of days ago that the contest was over and we could make minor edits to the stories again, so I'm adding this as a Deleted Scene/second chapter as I consider it canon to the story I wrote (in addition to containing a couple of jokes I like). It takes place after the Crystal Gems split up the first time, and is what their thoughts were as they worked before meeting back up again._

 _Please enjoy!_

* * *

As she worked her way through the Downtown Loop line, Pearl noticed that the tendril network strongly resembled a Mycelium. Such a comparison would be a good starting point to explain the mushroom-shaped sound emitters to Steven. To stave off boredom while quickly, _carefully_ tearing the tendrils from the walls, she was also mentally writing up an academic paper describing a speaker-string system based on what they'd encountered. The engineering required to duplicate it effectively through non-Gem technology meant that it likely wouldn't be commercially viable - though it might make an effective shark net replacement or Gem Monster detection system. Wouldn't hurt to have the patent regardless, she figured.

Garnet was working quickly through the Edward-Yondan line, pulling the tendrils off the walls like yarn out of knitting. There was the mission, routine and boring, and not much else. It wasn't the best part of her day, but that was how having a job worked; the best part of a mission was going home afterwards and seeing Steven. And they were all going to have fun too. She'd hadn't played mini-golf in a while, not since Rose Quartz had brought along the Crystal Gems to what she'd misunderstood as a _meeting_ with Greg at the Mini Golf Course. (Deep inside, Ruby and **especially** Sapphire were singing songs about competition to each other. "Ears of the Tiger" was an old favorite.)

Elsewhere, Amethyst was running along the Airport line, tearing out tendrils in the process. To pass the time she was singing Jody Mackson songs at the top of her lungs. Since she couldn't hear herself she sang louder and louder, until someone near a vent on the surface could probably hear an acapella rendition of the _Suspense_ album over the ringing. This continued for some time, through two more albums, and it was only when she was halfway through _Atrocious_ that she remembered she was wearing earmuffs.


End file.
